Robot Souls Programming in Humanity

Two of the biggest design problems in Artificial Intelligenceare how to build robots that behave in line with human values and how to stop them ever going rogue. One under-explored solution to these alignment and control problems might be to examine how these are already addressed in the design of humans. Looking closely at the human blueprint, it contains a suite of capacities that are so clumsy they have generally been kept away from AI. It was assumed that robots with features like emotions and intuition, that made mistakes and looked for meaning and purpose, would not workas well as robots without this kind of code. But on considering why all these irrational properties are there, it seems that they emerge from the source code of soul. Because it is actually this ‘junk’ code that makes us human and promotes the kind of reciprocal altruism that keeps humanity alive and thriving. Robot Souls looks at developments in AI and reviews the emergence of ideas of consciousness and the soul. It places our ‘junk code’ in this context and argues that it is time to foreground that code, and to use it to look again at how we are programming AI.

1. What is AI? 1.1. Is AI Conscious? 1.2. Robots 1.3. Inventing AI 1.4. Deep Learning 1.5. Reinforcement Learning 1.6. Bayesian AI 1.7. The Turing Test 2. How Should We Relate to AI? 2.1. How Should We Treat AI? 2.2. Regulation 2.3. Legal Status 2.4. Audit 2.5. Asimov 2.0 3. Will AI Replace Us? 3.1. Our Obsolescence Problem 3.2. The 12 Dooms 3.3. Distinctiveness 3.4 Materialism 3.5 Free Will and the Rule of Law 4. What Is Consciousness? 4.1. Mind 4.2. Consciousness 4.3. Qualia 5. How Do We Know? 5.1. How We Know Things 5.2. Thinking Styles 5.3 Types of Intelligence 6. The Soul 6.1. History of the Soul 6.2. Mapping Soul to Consciousness 7. Junk Code 7.1 Junk Code? 7.2. Emotions 7.3. Mistakes 7.4. Storytelling 7.5. Sixth Sense 7.6. Uncertainty 7.7. Free Will 7.8. Meaning 7.9. Community 8. Cultivating Soul 8.1. Cultivating Junk Code 8.2. Emotions 8.3. Mistakes 8.4. Storytelling 8.5. Sixth Sense 8.6. Uncertainty 8.7. Free Will 8.8. Meaning 9. Programming in Humanity 9.1. Why Bother? 9.2. Parenting 9.3. Gender 9.4 Coding Soul? 9.5. Emotions 9.6. Mistakes 9.7. Storytelling 9.8. Sixth Sense 9.9. Uncertainty 9.10. Free Will 9.11. Meaning 9.12. Robot Manifesto 10. Eucatastrophe 10.1. Changing Our Minds 10.2. Happily Ever After? Appendix. Glossary. References. Index.

Eve Poole has a BA from Durham, an MBA from Edinburgh, and a PhD from Cambridge. She has an OBE for services to education and gender equality and is a Life Fellow of the RSA. Following a career at Deloitte and Ashridge Business School, she was Chairman of Gordonstoun (2015-2021), Third Church Estates Commissioner for England (2018-2021), and Interim Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022). Her previous books include Capitalism’s Toxic Assumptions, Buying God, and Leadersmithing, which was highly commended in the 2018 Business Book Awards.